Musings on art, life, A.D.D., and…OOOOH! SQUIRREL!

Month: March 2014

here I am, still in the experimental stage of this blog. I’m still a rank noobie in the world of blogging, trying to figure out even the most basic of things…how to find my blog, how to find other people’s blogs, how to switch between the blog and the dashboard…I’m sure many of you remember that first, awkward phase! Blogging etiquette, ping backs, blavatars, gravatars – I didn’t realize there would be so much more than just jumping in and typing random thoughts and posting cool art.

Thus far I’m finding the whole interface rather clunky and non-intuitive. I’ll be much happier when it’s not such a chore just trying to make things work, and I can get down to the business of producing some interesting content!

The pic for today is a photo I took of my HaHa Toys High Wheel Robot. It’s a modern Chinese copy of a classic vintage robot made by KO/Yoshiya in Japan.

I was happy with the lighting and overall look of the photo. The valuable lesson that I took away from this shoot is that you REALLY have to pay close attention in preparing your subject for the shoot! Despite giving the robot what I thought was a thorough cleaning, I found that a glance at the finished photos revealed a lot of lint and dust left behind by the cloth I used for the job. Now I have a whole batch of beautifully lit, perfectly exposed photos that are ABSOLUTELY USELESS due to the fact that the amount of time it would take to clean them up in photoshop would probably be greater than just starting over from scratch.

This is an illustration of Radicon Robot, a vintage tin battery-operated toy robot made by Nomura in Japan, I think in the early sixties.

I created this piece on my iPad using a program called Procreate. Of all the digital art programs I’ve tried, it has the best interface for a smooth workflow. This piece was done using a regular stylus; as you can see, you can get pretty good results without a pressure-sensitive stylus.

The black line art was done with the pen tool, with the colored elements filled in using the paint features…round brush for flat color areas, and the damp brush used to create the pastel-like textures.